Anyone used Premier Property Lawyers?

RockingEthel

I wish I'd found this post before. Don't use them!

Whippetgirl_2

We seem to be in the same situation as most others here. We are currently using PPL for our purchase and sale and have found them appalling. I can never speak to my own solicitor, they never reply to emails (not even to confirm receipt of important documents), I am constantly given wrong information, they never chase anything up, things only get done when I ring them and they spent 2 months to answer one email from our seller's solicitor that only took 10 minutes in the end.


I find that they are hindering, rather than helping the process and if we do get to exchange it will be despite them, rather than because of them. We were supposed to exchange yesterday but they told me at the last minute that I needed to have sent off a document to be processed (that they should have told me about 4 months ago) and that this will now take a few more days. We are up against a deadline and this may delay things to the extent we cannot complete.


We chose them as they were slightly less expensive than other solicitors however I now wish I'd paid more and gone local.

tigsly

do you have an EWAY system.. attached to yoru account? - Can you not see the 'enquirys' ect there?

Myrtle77

Is it not about time that the MSE team got involved in this? Whilst I understand that they do not endorse either PPL or London & Country, a great many people on here ending up using PPL because of London & Country's sponsorship of MSE's mortgage guide.

Whoop

We used them and regretted it. Completely useless. Did their survey after and told them we won't be recommending them to anyone!

Santa_Claus_1

It took us 6 months exactly to finally complete and if we hadn't been chasing things up daily ourselves, everything would have fallen through. I have never known anything like it.
If you get Vibhuti as your case handler ask somebody else asap!!!Team leader took our case towards the end as nothing was being done by Vibhuti. I Looked at their website and they were recruiting conveyancers, no qualifications or experience needed! That explains a lot...
I am so glad I don't have to have any further dealings with them. DO NOT USE!!!

Spotjack

Used Premier Property Lawyers on recommendation of estate agents. Simple move, first time buyer buying the property, the new property empty since November 2013, end of chain. PPL lost emails, one on 5 occasions. Never returned phone calls. Everyone agreed to move in December 2013, but in Feb 2014 still no sign of an end to it. On the last Monday in Feb phone call to PPL at 8am to be told person dealing with move would phone back, never happened, phoned again to be told he was on annual leave. Email sent to Chairman of PPL, reply from another person with incorrect information, Friday of that week exchanged and completed and moved. PPL owned by Yourmove same directors in both companies and they have links to loads of estate agents. Friends have also used this company should have moved yesterday and it still hasn't happened. My experience is that this company take on more than they can handle, they have an 0844 number, they are in Leicester so you can't pop in if there is a problem. All in all what should have been a simple move ended up causing more stress than was really necessary. AVOID

alittlecynical

Like so many I wish I'd seen this before... PPL are a joke, we are now in our new home and they did end up waiving the fees on the sale as they screwed up so badly. I think this was only as London and Country who referred me to them got in on the act and supported me.
So the long and the short is they sat on my queries for 8 weeks. They never did anything proactive, their system is totally reactive. So they don't work out all the potential issues and work on them straight away, instead they just wait for everything to be in place and then try to sort the hold up, then they find the next one, so a second delay and so on and so forth. Whilst they weren't responding to my purchasers queries for eight weeks they also weren't sending them the lease, which meant a defect was discovered at the last minute meaning that we had a delay of a month. In the end I would ask them what needed doing and phone the council etc to do it and send it to them and copy in the purchasers solicitor, that way he knew they had it and could ask for it through the right channels. Back to queries, some questions had to be asked of the management company, some of the company who ran the park, rather than ask them at the same time they waited for the management lot to say we can't answer these questions before they asked the correct people. One lot had a one week turn around the other a two week one, so that was another week gone. I think they probably added 3 months to the process over a competent solicitor. They became the second most called number on my phone after my wife. On my wife, she resigned from her job early thinking it was about to go through, and then sat around at home for nearly 2 months, cheers PPL, so by the time she's in work that will be about 3 months of wages lost. Then it took 3 or 4 attempts to get the financial statements sorted, they forgot to deduct the advance we'd given for searches and they tried to put in three money laundering checks for two of us.
They may be ok with a very simple purchase, but if there is a leasehold property or anything that may be remotely complex they can't cope.

janthemum

Likewise,
Avoid these cowboys.

Im becoming stressed just thinking of them and how they dealt with my purchase.

If I hadnt kept on pursuing it and on the phone all the time at the end always speaking to someone different I think I would have been waiting to move in still and was in 6 weeks agao. But I honestly believe that.

I could write a book on what they did (or rather what they didnt do) but it just stresses me.

It was the EA who recommended and I complained to them. They said only 2nd complaint in 10 years (somehow I dont think so!)

Wolfsbane2k

Wow, looks like i've been lucky so far with these guys which i'm using to purchase a property and sell my current house.

I've gone with them directly, rather than via the L&C Recommendation, ( Although MSE do seem to recommend them ( or at least recommend looking at them here http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/mortgages/house-buying-guide ) - they go under easer2move, 1st property lawyers, and premier property lawyers and got a friendly lady as my main point of call who works 3 days a week, and a second point of call if they are out.

So far they have been very good, and i'm hearing these words from the estate agents as well as my dealings with them. Their Eway system is not quite what i expected, as it takes some time for documents/updates to appear - i thought it was a direct copy of their internal filing system, but it's not, it's a customer version which they have to upload documents to, so it's typically 2 to 3 days after something has happened that I get informed of a change from that system, but has been up to a week to learn that they asked an additional inquiry.

They appear to have been very helpful in trying to speed up things after Country Wide Property Services added 6 weeks delay into the system, but we're in the to-and-froing of enquiries at the moment.

I've had to ask them a few things to ask via enquiries,. for things that weren't clear from paperwork, like a conservatory having electrical circuits, but no NICEIC cert provided for this work, so you do need to be quite diligent as well in understanding what is being provided to you to read, and i have typically been calling them once a week for a 5 minute call to check if I could help speed things up at all, or to get a status, and i understand that the my EA and the EA of my vendors have been doing the same.

We're now waiting to exchange with 4 enquiries left, and it's been a week and a bit since the LA search was returned (PPL issued enquires the same day that this was returned by the LA)

All in all, they currently seem on par than the local solicitors i dealt with 10 years ago when i bought the house i'm now selling, and they are definitely cheaper, but the communication seems clearer, probably due to the magic of the internet.

So yes, there is a mass of variation, they seem to balance the workload across multiple sites, so you may get a good team, or you may not.